place arises from the
supposed necessity of making the drama credible. The criticks hold it
impossible, that an action of months or years can be possibly believed
to pass in three hours; or that the spectator can suppose himself to sit
in the theatre, while ambassadors go and return between distant kings,
while armies are levied and towns besieged, while an exile wanders and
returns, or till he whom they saw courting his mistress, shall lament
the untimely fall of his son. The mind revolts from evident falsehood,
and fiction loses its force when it departs from the resemblance of
reality.

From the narrow limitation of time necessarily arises the contraction of
place. The spectator, who knows that he saw the first act at Alexandria,
cannot suppose that he sees the next at Rome, at a distance to which not
the dragons of Medea could, in so short a time, have transported him; he
knows with certainty that he has not changed his place; and he knows
that place cannot change itself; that what was a house cannot become a
plain; that what was Thebes can never be Persepolis.

Such is the triumphant language with which a critick exults over the
misery of an irregular poet, and exults commonly without resistance or
reply. It is time, therefore, to tell him, by the authority of
Shakespeare, that he assumes, as an unquestionable principle, a
position, which, while his breath is forming it into words, his
understanding pronounces to be false. It is false, that any
representation is mistaken for reality; that any dramatick fable in its
materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever
credited.

The objection arising from the impossibility of passing the first hour
at Alexandria, and the next at Rome, supposes, that when the play opens,
the spectator really imagines himself at Alexandria, and believes that
his walk to the theatre has been a voyage to Egypt, and that he lives in
the days of Anthony and Cleopatra. Surely he that imagines this may
imagine more. He that can take the stage at one time for the palace of
the Ptolemies, may take it in half an hour for the promontory of Actium.
Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation; if the
spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander
and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of
Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above
the reach of reason, or of truth, and from the heights of e